112 Mercer Street

Einsteins house at 112 Mercer Street is located only a short distance
from Nassau Street, the main street of this university town. Nassau Street
at its western end divides into several avenues, like the trunk of a maple
tree that throws many unequal branches simultaneously at one and the same
joint. Two of the streets run toward Trenton; if one should walk along
one of them, Mercer Street, past the buildings of the Princeton Theological
Seminary, he would find Einsteins house on the left side where the
street begins to go downhill. The wooden two-story building stands between
not dissimilar neighboring structures. It is unpretentious with a narrow
front and stretches into the backyard with its gray-painted sidings. Located
in an area of low elevation, it is probably in one of the less comfortable
parts of town, hot and humid in the summer. Einstein used to leave the
town in the summer months and go to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, but
in later years he discontinued his summer departures and stayed home.

Continuing a block or two along the street, one comes to Springfield
Street on the left, and this well-shadowed valley would bring Einstein
on foot to the Institute for Advanced Studyhe had only to choose
one of the streets with mansions or well-kept villas, like Battle Road,
to turn right and then he could already see the Institute, built in the
nineteenth-century style, in red brick, with a cupola and spire, standing
out across a field from the approaching visitor. In later years Einstein
discontinued his daily walk to the Institute and back and used the Institute
vehicle, a kind of small omnibus, which would pick him up as it did other
members.

In the Institute he was rather lonely. I once read that Gödel, who
used to travel on the same bus, was closest to him of all the members
of the Institute. Dr. Kurt Gödel, a mathematician and a great introvert,
who lived at the other end of the town, was a silent man, with greying
hair, who even in summer bundled himself against drafts, and was certainly
of limited inspiration for Einstein who, though solitary, was greatly
interested in human contact, warm in handshake, roaring with laughter.
Gödel, like other famous mathematicians in the history of this abstract
and exact science, produced the feat that made him famous at an early
age, in his twenties, only to find the spring dry in the following decades.
They could converse on some philosophical subjectI repeatedly saw
Gödel on the third floor of the University Library studying books
on philosophy or psychology.

A man of very different disposition and much closer to Einstein was V.
Bargmann, a theoretical physicist, who was not a member of the Institute,
but a professor at Princeton University. He wasand isan unswerving
follower of Einstein, prepared to offer a fierce front to anybody who
would challenge Einsteins theories. I believe that among the physicists
in Princeton Bargmann was closest to Einstein while the younger generation
of physicists showed a certain skepticism concerning the General Theory
of Relativity in view of its apparent conflict with Quantum Theory, and
because of Einsteins rejection of Heisenbergs Principle of
Indeterminacy (God does not play dice).